Paralysis

 Well. Here we are. The computer screen is bleary as I type. My right eye doesn’t blink so I have to anoint it with thick goo. My open eyeball stubbornly faces the muzzle of the eye-gel, watches the distended drop descend. Never have my eyes been so brave. Amazing what paralysis does. I watch the drop fall onto my vision and then I pinch my eyelid together with my fingers to mimic a blink. My eye doesn’t care. It stares me down even as I try to tape it closed or cover it with an eyepatch. It just stares stubbornly into the dark.

My eyelid does twitch, though. A little hitch of involuntary movement, like a dead frog kicking under the knife. Makes sense, those amphibious nerves have died. If “Died” is too dramatic a word, then -- they have been amputated. Pinched off and killed like a lizard’s tail. 

My right ear is… strange. Imparied. As though I’m listening to the world from under the water. As if all of the sounds are flattened to be at the same level of intensity/volume/forefront/background-- I’m sure there’s fancy audio words for that. But it means that everything sounds muffled and also painfully sharp. My left ear is muffled too. I wish everyone knew sign language. 

My mouth on the right side is unresponsive. So my left side is working twice as hard, grimacing and cringing, protuberant and loose-lipped. My left cheek twists and my eye squeezes trying to get the right side to do something. “Blink, please!!” my left eye begs and my right eye ignores it, facing down dust and whipping willow branches and glaring sunlight without a flinch. My left eye winces on the other’s behalf.

Speaking is uncomfortable-- my words are slurred, my tongue is heavy. And along the right side of my tongue everything tastes like metal coated in bitter poison. 

I’m not enjoying this.

But this is temporary-- it should be temporary. Three months, probably. 

Two weeks ago I woke up in agony, a pain worse than childbirth in my ear. It spread through my cheekbone, my teeth, my jaw. I couldn’t smell, couldn’t taste except for a horrible bitterness. And everything I heard had a screaming tiny saw two octaves above it, like an evil little rumplestiltskin playing the saw along with every melody. Three urgent care visits and an ER visit once my face went slack: Ear infection, sinus infection, and Bell’s Palsy. 

Temporary. Weird, annoying, but temporary.

(I had a vivid dream the first night of palsy, before I knew what was happening. Lizards with staring eyes turning to stone because they were unable to lick their eyes. And then lizards chopped neatly in half, cartoonishly bone-in. The injured half retreated to regrow while the dead half dessicated and mummified.

That’s my facial nerves. Inflammation pinched them off like a lizard tail. Now my nerves have retreated to try and regenerate themselves. 

But it will most likely heal completely. 80% of the time it heals completely. I hope it does. I don’t like feeling like a stranger to my own face.

I called Katie on the way into the ER for CT scans. She was on her way into the hospital for her CT scans. We cackled with anxiety and disbelief, “Same, girl, same!!! OMG have so fun getting your CT scans!!” 

The guy in line behind me had been hit by a bus.

The receptionist asked if he had any covid symptoms. He said, “No, but I have ‘getting-hit-by-a-bus-symptoms.”

 Hahahahhhahha I love ER humor. 

When the nurse wheeled me to the CT scan she took the corners fast and I laughed, how’s the drift on these chairs?? She said, “oh these chairs are TERRIBLE. But we can at least get around corners if we time it right. It’s the beds, though, I drift those beds into every doorway!” She demonstrated for me as she swung me into the CT room, skidding side-ways on the wheels.

Then she took pictures of my brain, because of the family history of cancer, and to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke. 

I was not having a stroke. Also no cancer. 

I texted Katie a picture later with my eyepatch on over my dried out glaring glassy eye: “Ugh why am I so obsessed with you???”

Her right eye is blind now, entirely. When I videochat with her, I can tell a little-- the pupil is a little blown, the iris darker. It is an eye into her cancer, into a tiny spot of sun damage that risks spreading cancerous spores throughout her soft body and taking her down into the earth, dismantling her life. Wreckage and ruin.

But that’s not today. 

Today I talked with her and she was watching the red cardinals out of her window and blessing them and cursing them as avatars of our beloved dead. Matt, Grandma Betty, our mama Kira…

One more minute with our mom-- we’d give anything for even one more minute with her. That’s worth remembering when it seems like our kids would be glad to be rid of us.

One more nano-second. I’d give worlds.

And Matt, my help-meet, my husband. He was Katie’s good brother. He should be here for her, fearing for her, worrying about her, uncling her kids, brothering her husband.

I’m not sure what forgiveness means. I don’t know what it would mean to forgive Matt. I will never say it was okay that he died, okay that he killed himself. But I think I can understand more and more that he didn’t have a choice-- that in a moment of terrible pain, he had to take action. And because of a stew of circumstances, bad luck, and previous experiences, the action that he was prepared to take was suicide. 

I think I can love him and his memory without resentment. I can understand him. It’s not about me.

Today, right now, I am just going to rest. I am going to ignore the laundry and the to-do list and the budget and the paperwork and the overgrown garden and I am going to curl up on the couch and watch shows and nap. I’m going to give my poor lizardy facial nerves a chance to regrow their prehensile tails.